George Steven Botterill
Number of games in database: 168
Years covered: 1968 to 1997
Last FIDE rating: 2360
Highest rating achieved in database: 2410Overall record: +51 -59 =56 (47.6%)*
* Overall winning percentage = (wins+draws/2) / total games
Based on games in the database; may be incomplete.
2 exhibition games, odds games, etc. are excluded from this statistic.

George Steven Botterill was born in Bradford, England.
He was awarded the IM title in 1978. He learned to play chess at age seven and played for Oxford University from 1969 to 1972.
Botterill won the Welsh title (jointly) in 1973, figured in a seven-way tie for the British Championship and in the subsequent play-off he finished half a point ahead of William Hartston and therefore took the title (1974). He also won the title outright in 1977.
He's best known for his collaboration with Raymond Keene in two works on the Modern and Pirc Defences.

raylopez99: Botterill wrote a series of books that I enjoyed on chess, and is well known in UK chess circles--RL

"One of the things that appeals to me about competitive chess (I mean over-the-board chess, though presumably the same goes for correspondence chess if there is not too much collusion) is that it is, as games go, very fair. There is quite a lot of luck in chess over the short term. But on the whole it tends to cancel out. Certainly chess compares very favourably with all the things that go under the designation 'real life' ,with all the stacked decks, silver spoons, nepotism, favouritism and disastrous misfortunes that attend. In comparison with the crazy unpredictability and uncontrollability of most of human existence, playing chess (even in a time-scramble!) is like a paradise of rationality. I really do mean that..." -George Botterill International Master

Dionysius: He taught me philosophy when I was an undergraduate at Aberystwth in the mid 1970's. We were a small group of philosophy undergraduates, and we used to take it in turns to see how many matches we could make him waste on his pipe by asking questions which required him to pause while lighting his pipe. He was all of 26 or 27. I played him a game with 5 minutes on my clock, 2 minutes on his, and he beat me without me ever knowing what was going on. A Caro Kahn it was,at a university chess team meeting upstairs in the Cardigan Arms hotel, probably Spring 2007. Happy days.

Caissanist: The author of today's QOTD is unknown, but it's similar to the Botterill quote given by Ray Lopez above:

<Playing chess gives us a chance to start out life over again, and this time, no one has more money than us, no one is more beautiful, no one lives in a better neighborhood, and we all go to the same school. Other than having the first move (and this benefit is shared equally) no one starts with any unfair advantage. >

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